A Reader: Lucy Harrison, Sharon Kivland & Nina Papaconstantinou
08.03.03 – 12.04.03
Domo Baal presents an exhibition of text–based work exploring the intervention of a reader into written language. A publication will accompany 'A Reader' with work by Lucy Harrison, Sharion Kivland and Nina Papaconstantinou.
Lucy Harrison's work makes reference to language and literature, using the leftovers of human activities and gaps between words. It uses those texts which have been discarded, exposing the frailty of human language. In this exhibition she will be showing several new works, which look at public spaces for reading and the awkwardness of public speaking. These works will include a study of spy stories and a collection of notes from the margins of books in a college library.
Having retreated from both Marx and Freud into the realm of luxury department stores, Sharon Kivland now directs her tender and malicious concern towards proper names and improper actions, giving up her usual series of literary references in favour of uncertainty and mistranslation. Nouns are taken from their commonplaces and are reused, taking rather different positions in chains of meaning. While the works may look quite lady–like, certainly refined, benefiting from attractive – if conventional – materials and means, they do not behave as they should if good behaviour is to be expected. New works include embroidered handkerchiefs with a distasteful connotation, ugly little scars in association with revolutionary change, and some pathetic attempts of recognition, wreathed in failure. 'Fragments d'une Correspondence Litteraire' will also be included; drawing on fragments from Denis Diderot's letters to Sophie Volland, this work exists both as a social document and as a record of an extraordinary love affair. Produced and distributed by Book Works, London.
For this exhibition Nina Papaconstantinou will show mostly graphite drawings on tracing paper that are part of an on–going project on the investigation of the relationship between text and texture; a combination of semi–transparent abstract landscapes of thoroughly traced marks, grays, empty spaces and blurred typeface borderlines. Most of the text drawings are landscapes of dense layers of handwritten text, overlaid marks that resemble a process similar to tapestry or weaving, which in its turn is connected to the act of storytelling. Text is not meant to be read but to be seen as an image; her work aims to make visible what language itself generates: a deceptive imagery.
A collaborative artists’ book 'A Reader' will be published to accompany this exhibition published by domobaal editions, and available from the gallery.